For those who believe recent art history is a dish best served cold, Eric Doeringer is precisely the cook you've been looking for. All summer at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects on Queen Street, Doeringer, who is based in New York, has been presenting a series of his exacting knock-offs of the late 20th century's greatest art hits. The result is part homage, but much larger part winking send-up of a cheeky idealism that was almost instantly subsumed by an art industry hungry for product.

He calls it Survey, and in June, Doeringer re-created famous wall drawings by Minimalist godfather Sol LeWitt, a spray-can blot by Lawrence Weiner, and stills from Andy Warhol's static, iconic experimental film Empire. Last week, he showed his versions of Damien Hirst's infamous “spot paintings,” and alarmingly faithful simulacra of Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboys), which he made by photographing Marlboro cigarette ads from the 1980s.

This week, the cycle brings us to Doeringer's tribute — what else to call it? — to big-name west-coast Conceptualists John Baldessari, Charles Ray and Ed Ruscha, whose early works were explorations of the mundane — gesture, form and architecture alike — that seemed to proliferate in the warm California sun.

A landmark piece by Ray, All My Clothes, from 1973, had the artist model his entire wardrobe, in 16 stiffly identical head-to-tie portraits. Doeringer, naturally, does exactly the same. Another, Baldessari's work A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation, makes the piece about its own process of being made; Doeringer's version, in identical block-lettering to the original, tracks the same step-by-step. On the walls, he re-creates Ruscha's Stains, which was just that: The artist blotting square sheets of paper with household materials like Drano, mustard, red wine and tea.

The question you must be asking, of course, is why? Well, easy. Doeringer is putting conceptual art truisms to the test: The most obvious is the age-old conceptual saw that the idea or gesture, and not the object itself, is the art (tell that to the auction houses that do well selling Ruscha bookworks or Ray photographs for hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

Conceptualism was, ultimately, art about art, a subversive movement meant as critique to a commercial ethos tethered to precious art object wrought by the hand of singular creative geniuses. Conceptualism said good-bye to all that — LeWitt's wall drawings were sets of instructions to be executed by whomever; ditto Weiner's often-estoric edicts. The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard's canonical 1972 text on Conceptualism, put just those rules to the game.

In time, though, it said hello again, and Doeringer follows its footsteps in his own critique — a conceptual conceptualist, once removed. As though to put a fine point on it, Survey includes a redacted version of Lippard's book, which bluntly points out Conceptualism's eminently objectified collectability: Doeringer's over-writes the ‘D' with an ‘R', making the art object in this case undeniably Rematerialized.

A recent project of Doeringer's was called Bootlegs, in which the artist would cheaply produce small scale knock-offs of famous contemporary artist's works that he'd then sell in the sidewalk in New York (think John Currin, Glenn Ligon, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat — a sort of fake Rolex for the culturally astute).

Bootlegs was more blatant, a cheeky send-up of the commodity-driven contemporary art world (my favourtie: A teeny-tiny rip-off of Jeff Wall's The Invisible Man, in a wee lightbox, no less). With Survey, Doeringer steps past a very good one liner and into the realm of institutional critique. Conceptualism is surely an institution, a temple of ideas at which generations of artists have come to pray. But Doeringer is less heretic than prophet, putting the towering genius of a previous generation to its own test.

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